BMW stops heated seat subscriptions, misses the point on why consumers are mad
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
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This man was willing to sell out for a shirt.
Must be a damn good shirt
It is a damn good shirt. This one is stretched, messed up, and faded, but in the beginning it was beautiful.
I would trade rossmann repair group for 4 of this shirt
evidently it is lol :D
I've got one pair of shorts from adidas that are ruined now. They don't sell any similar shorts like it. I would pay $100+, they originally cost me $15.
@@rossmanngroup good to read im not the only 1 like that. Like i had shorts back in the day that where perfect for me. Now i was lucky, i got like 6 of them. But over time they just wear out and you couldnt get them anymore after that year. But they where so damn good that i even travelled to a brand shop 100 miles away to look if they maybe had them, but offcourse they didnt.
Well...Everyone has their price....
"People feel that they pay double, but that is not true" Technicaly BMW is correct, it is much more than double.
It's not paying for the heated seats and not being able to use them. It's about paying for the switch that should not be there. That lets them turn off the seats.😨
@@alannitcher5001 but when you don;t have $$ to pay for heated sits NOW you will need to pay way more for it in the future (assuming you want to install them later). With software feature you pay for not heated sits but you can enable heating later when you have money. How is this solution worse?
@@korinogaro You clearly don't understand. For THEM is CHEAPER to have only ONE PRODUCTION LINE than two.
And, no, for a normal person it won't be more expensive, you just have to swap the seats for some that have some wires that heat up when electricity passes trough. It's not hard, it's not a novelty.
Technically paying double is a subset of paying triple or more.
So yes, they are paying double, not "just" double
@@Splarkszter and what I wrote? It is cheaper for manufacturer with one variant of the seat and for customer there is no difference. And how is paying for the heating 'on' some time after you buy car not cheaper than swapping seats?
When Japanese manufacturers began selling in the U.S. they realized that, for example, if they put a radio in every car they would save enough in overall manufacturing costs to include radios without additional charge. Detroit never understood that and continued to sell “optional” items that buyers of Japanese cars got “at no extra cost”. That certainly helped Japanese manufacturers gain market share.
I'm don't think Detroit didn't understand manufacturing costs, I suspect that it was just coordinated selling among the US car manufactures...and Japanese manufactures were just not part of the club. I think when an industry is reduced to 3 or 4 big players, then they manipulate the market to some extent.
@@reekinronald6776nah Detroit is dumber than Japan, just admit it
They just thought they were the big dog, and who cares if some no name Japanese manufacturer does that? Surely the customer won’t buy them over us, we’re the best in the world! Hubris basically.
It's cheaper to include all the most popular options as standard equipment than it is to make countless combinations of option packages. My wife's first car was an Isuzu built Chevrolet Spectrum Express. It was a base-model econobox that didn't even come with a radio. I picked up a Pioneer stereo and speakers, only to discover that there were OEM speakers already installed... in a car with no radio. It was probably easier and cheaper to put speakers in all the dashboards than it was to track which few chassis didn't need them. I put the good Pioneer speakers in anyway, but I kept the brand-new ones from the Isuzu. I installed them when I put a radio in my mother in law's Toyota pickup years later.
That's how you'd get car brand radios in normal aftermarket slots because they already had something, the car brand would just buy something fron sony or sanyo etc and rebrand it and comes with the car. Great marketing great deal
Crazy that my ‘98 Volvo can turn on the seat heater for free and now almost 30 years later you have to pay a subscription to be allowed to turn them on. True progress
Cheers from a fellow 98 V70 user that doesn't have a subscription.
Volvo is better than bmw anyway.
Its the Ashkenazi techno Bolshevik takeover of the entire world,educate yourself about who's behind the curtain on land of OZ.
Too bad Volvo's are now Chinese cars stealing your data when u plug in your phone.
The old Volvo wagons are still the best ones around.
@@golbs7542just like Apple, Google, Tesla, Meta, etc are american companies that does the same thing. It just that they are muricans so its okay I guess
As Louis said, making people pay for a heated seat is like paying a subscription fee to recline your seat. It's literally hardware that has been paid for and purchased by the consumer.
What next a subscription to be able to put air in the tires LOL!!!
naw bro if that is real then id rather be puncturing my tire just to air it@@charleshines2142
@@charleshines2142please don’t give manufacturers ideas
Pure greed!
I said it once and I'll say it again. It all started with the f@ckers at TiVo that has the audacity to charge a monthly to use a device that you paid for. And to you f%ckers that say it's software why doesn't Samsung and other smart TV manufacturers charge a monthly fee for the built-in TV guide. TiVo is a damn ripoff and their business practice is unethical.
Consider this: There are many consumers (myself included) that do no want a vehicle that is connected to the internet in any way, shape, or form. Car companies need to start offering totally DISCONNECTED vehicles. More and more consumers are demanding to be free of these cameras and monitoring features. Just look at Nissan's most recent, so-called "Privacy Policy" (or the recent Tesla scandal) to see why consumers are rejecting "connected" vehicles.
Disconnected vehicles. Also called; used vehicles
In Europe starting with Euro7 it would be mandatory to send after each long drive informations to the server so you can stop dreaming about that. I can bet that something similar is implemented on other continents.
Yup, it's what I love about older cars and hate about newer cars. I am at the point where I have become anti-latest tech. The older tech was better.
Its easy to disconnect the antenna on my car. So I did. OK so no sat nav updates. I prefer Google maps anyway.
OP it doesn't matter. Everything is connected in some fashion. Even if you get an older vehicle, your insurance company can and will make you do an OBDII port reader in order to (observe you) give you a discount.... I don't like it either, but this is the world we live in. You can have a 25 year old vehicle and it will be connected if your auto insurance wants it, and if not, they can drop you.
My thoughts on the lesson the executives need to learn: if you make your customers pay for a whole bunch of things up front, you annoy them once. If you charge them a subscription for them, you annoy them every month forever. The more you annoy someone, the more they will resent you for it.
They don't care if you resent them as long as you pay. The only lesson that will stick is lost revenue and falling stock price.
@@kevinlopezobrien5366 Which is precisely what will happen if they breed enough resentment and customers say "Never again! Anyone but them!" next time they start looking into replacements.
@@Roxor128 here's to hoping!
This is how I treat Adobe.
@@VulpeculaJoyfunnily enough, if someone found a way to safely pirate adobe. im sure they would find a way with this. All you need is an OBD reader and some RUclips tutorial.
These companies do not WANT to get it. They know darn well what they're doing and they're going to continue doing so even when they start seeing red. The insanity is astounding.
They get it it is just that they don't want to publicly accept it in fear that some heads will roll. Now they can't do it but they have a large than the sky ego so you can bet that they are thinking in what other ways that could make it happen.
The major shareholders are probably pushing it
Not to harp on BMW again, but this is the company that managed to piss off a lot of people in the mid 2000's by changing the electrical system on ALL of their cars to same unreliable one!
if they know what they are doing then they get it, and let's be clear, they do get it, they just don't care
They know what they doing, just trying normalize more crap. Add and expand BS like software and consumer electronics world (and many others) doing. With people trying justify this crap, working nicely. Or someone should declare interest why so adamantly defending and endorsing those "good" practices.
They don't call us customers anymore, they call us consumers
Useful suckers.
"They don't call us customers anymore, they call us consumers"
Oh. Didn't notice that. Well if everything suddenly is "services", naturally they want all customers to be consumers of it.
the difference between the two words is minimal, and typically they are interchangable.
a customer is someone who buys a product, or service. the primary definition of a consumer is also someone who buys a product, or service. it can also be defined as a person who uses a good, or service, but didn't buy.
so it's not like some dehumanizing element exists between the two.
@@TTOOS you can choose to be triggered by words that don't mean what you think, or you can educate yourself and expand your vocabulary.
@@samagon00 One is demeaning and the other isn't. The trend of companies nowadays prefering the word consumers instead of customers goes hand in hand with their lower respect for the end user.
BMW does NOT listen to its customers. It listens to its shareholders. With BMW, it's ALL about the shareholders. This is one of the MAJOR PROBLEMS with any publicly traded company.
Not really the company is basically familie owend…..
@@catch_me_if_you_can1147 yes really, it is publicly traded. They are legally, well, contractually, required to make moves to maximize there profits for the shareholders.
@@catch_me_if_you_can1147they own a minority of the shares, so that's not correct
It listens to its internal businessmen also, that very closely follow profit. It's they who decide to cheap out and make more money seeking opportunities on top of their overpriced product while being cheaply manufactured vehicles, regardless of materials used. You basically pay for option, exclusivity and all the time and engineering that goes towards an overall experience that will be outdated in 5-10 years inevitably being standard or options on every basic car by then.
@@catch_me_if_you_can1147ts not family onwed when you can buy shares of it in the Frankfurt market.
If 90% of buyers are speccing the heated seats then they should probably be standard equipment.
They used to be, BMW is a German company after all and seat heaters are a BASIC function in German cars since forever… or rather they were
Why would anyone want to buy a BMW at this point anyway? New subscriptions feature...starting your car.
it aint better be raining while driving the bmw:3
@@nengyang1895 sorry, your break pedal subscription lapsed
@@JackPorter Click here if you want to renew, enter username, enter password, enter vin, date of bitrth (scroll up like forever), adres, drivers license number, ID card number, etc.... An eternity later: Sorry, this service can't be renewed due to technical issues, please try again later.
At least that is my experience with most modern crap.
Knowing how luxury car brands do things nowadays I wouldn't be shocked if the heated seat powered is shared with some weird module that disables the ignition if tampered with or interrupted in some way. Vehicles are becoming extremely complicated for no good reason.
But you can easily cut the wires coming from the seat, and hook them up to 12 volt and a switch.
Of course there could be something that 'sees' the seats heating isn't connected to the board computer anymore,
but I'm certain this is a challenge for some people to mess with.
@@scorchedearth1451the possibilities here are amazing. Subscriptions for basic features would create a whole new market dedicated to working around this kind of bullshit. You could charge people to circumvent their subscription options and unlock them permanently. I remember back in 2018 when bmw charged monthly for apple carplay. I hope the EU steps in and creates regulations cuz I know damn well that the US government won’t do it.
"It's hard to make a man understand something when his paycheck depends in him not understanding it."
Yup. Those with something to lose with truth love to push the lies.
The sad thing is that having customers that love your company is better than having paying hostages who hate your existence.
If your paycheck depends on you not understanding something, you should not HAVE a paycheck!
like Electronic Arts
Who was this quote from? Awesome!
Here in Australia I'm noticing more "old" cars restored and used as daily drivers. They aren't expensive, they are easy/cheap to work on and they appreciate in value instead of depreciate.
i dont see this so much for bmw in usa, but, who knew how good the e46, e60, would be. man i wish quality cars.
..and the older cars can't be shut down remotely, they don't track how hard you hit the brakes or gas pedal, how fast you drive, where you drive, etc... (all new cars must have a remote shut off in the U.S. starting in 2025 or 2026( I can't remember which year, but this law was just passed in the last trillion dollar omnibus bill))
...and the old cars won't rat you out like new cars do, when police have the manufacturer send them the telemetry data on request, as is now done when investigating some accidents...
it's great to keep older cars going, if you're fortunate to live in an area that doesn't use road salt, it's definitely better to save up a small reserve for future parts and a couple of tools. driver gets to learn something, save money, keep their independence. if you're willing to live with the very minor inconvenience of not having the latest tech, and don't have to deal with rust, it's great
i want to marry my old corolla my habibi
People in the UK need to revolt over that. ...with sticks I guess because the government took their guns a long time ago.
“Testing how the customer responds”. Translation: We do whatever we can to benefit us financially even if it means the customer is left with a poor value proposition. We do what we can get away with and push the customer as far as they will take it.
they will never run out of customers. a fool born every minute.
"see if we can get away with it"
@@rinzler9775It's my suspicion that this is what Unity is doing with their recent pricing model announcement - propose something outrageous, then depending on how much outrage follows, walk it back and say "see? We listened to our customers. Now we're only screwing them 73% as much!"
I don't know if Unity will actually walk back, but the industry as a whole will keep squeezing as hard as they can get away with.
@@KristovMars its the old boil the frog routine.
..that's what they teach at business schools...
It's not that they don't understand why we're irritated. It's that this is the world they want to make us live in. They believe that if they keep framing these things as a "service," we'll eventually accept it.
Edit: Also, Louis, there's an alarming number of people out there (the majority, I would guess) that, when they know something is wrong, don't give half a shit and will keep doing it anyway.
Accurate! They are trying to say it enough times to make it come true.
It's getting very hard to find a job that doesn't involve being an ass to customers.
@@AlabasterClay and sadly they are winning...
This is exactly right and it's completely wrong
Like TIVO charging a monthly fee to use your own equipment.
Oh I don't think they don't understand what was wrong. I think they know very well but if they keep referring to it as a service it will become a service in people's mind. It is the whole idea if you tell people a lie often enough they will believe it.
This.
Exactly. At worst they just have to hold out until those of us who remember what ownership means get senile or die. Try explaining to a 20-something and they already look at you like you're crazy.
@@rossmanngroupthis should be top comment
@tom.m
Agree. I once installed a pihole box in my fraternity house's internet for the purposes of saving bandwidth and limiting ads. Half the brotherhood complained that I took the ads away. The pihole box is still off last I checked since I graduated. Now it just runs the house Minecraft server
Maybe you will still afford a car that will respect new regulations ( new depollution norms, assisted driving, informations sent to the server after each long driving, onboard camera to monitor your fave and body position, certificate that will directly bloct the access to certain areas) but you wouldn't probably afford the next generations that will impose to have a fully autonomous car and other things.
"Testing how the customer responds is part of our process"...a likely story. Really that can be rephrased as, "We shit on our customers and rip them off and if they get really angry then we'll stop doing that. We'll give them the worst possible deal as long as they keep paying us. It's evil but we love it!"
" "Testing how the customer responds is part of our process"...a likely story. "
No, that is exactly what they do. They test how far they can go before they get backlash. Then they back off a little, just enough to get out of the back lash. They wait a while, and then they push forward even further until they get backlash again. Rinse and repeat.
The only endgame for them is extracting as much money as possible from anyone who is not them.
I think the biggest issue is making it a subscription for a 1 time service. I don't know how you didn't jump on this immediately because it's straight up right to own. To some extent I can see having to pay for the upgrade of something that's already there, but once I've paid for it it should be mine forever. Subscriptions should only be for things where the company continues to add value after the fact. A streaming service that keeps adding new movies, an MMO that has to maintain servers, if you have to continuously spend some amount of money for me, I can continuously pay you some amount of money in return.
But even as a single purchase, it still flies in the face of right to own because I own the car. If I own the car I should own everything in the car from end to end, and that includes the seat heaters. So selling me something I already own is an outright scam and should land you in jail just for trying.
Exactly. If they pulled this shit on me as I was signing the papers, I would walk away. Either I own the car or I don't. If I don't own the car and everything in it, then I don't want it.
a streaming service doesnt even need to add new movies to warrant a service fee because it costs money to keep the current collection on a server with reliable downloadload speed for people to view. new movies keeps customers around as there's something new to watch otherwise they leave once they saw what the wanted.
putting something into a product that requires it to connect to a server to say "yes" or "no" but actually provides nothing should be fucked over as a scam. people cry free market but getting your foot in the door to "compete" with these products is fucked up expense. yeah I want a buildable phone and laptop that's easy to repair/upgrade (fairphone and framework laptop) but it took forever for these products to get off the ground and even now a lot of people don't even know they exist. even tesla didn't get in to compete freely but had a fuck tone of government money funneled into it.
Here's how they think. Their C-suite and management are giving you service just for being there to keep the company existing. Don't buy luxury brands.
they introduced this subscription model to make money from the second marked. Today, BMW sells a feature once for 1000 $ and than the car exists 10, 20 or 50 years and might be repaired in a non BMW workshop. With that subscription model, they earn money from that car over it's whole lifetime. That means a steady stream of money which managers love (predicable cashflow) and they earn and earn and earn and they might force you to repair it in a BMW shop, otherwise the service is not activatable anymore. Another idea is to collect all those valuable data about what people do and sell those and use them to optimize cars. And while that has some value i guess, subscriptions are overall a horrible greedy idea and we haven't even looked into the impact onto the environment if we now add all the features in all the cars making them 200-1000 pounds heavier.
@@vanivari359 If they couldn't predict how pissed off this would make customers, though, they're dumbasses.
You hit the nail on the head here... A heated seat is a physical part (seat heater, relay, wiring), that needs to be added during manufacturing; it's mechanical in it's functionality. Parking assist, is a piece of written code or software that utilizes senors which are already built into the vehicle for other purposes. Why would I have to PAY for them to allow me to use a part that already paid for when I bought the car!?
because so many people are willing to - that's the problem
In 2018/19 when we were looking at cars there was a perfect one for us. What stopped us from getting it was the salesman said the remote start will be through their + model, meaning sub-per-month, for the "privilege" of starting the car through the fob or key ONLY. Could not even do it through the phone like other cars at the time. Basic things that are in the car/truck should not be disableable without notice.
anything that can be enable can be disabled as easily and the reason for doing it can be as simple as they dont like your politics
I loved it when Bill Burr said he practically bought a car and then they said: "now we need your finger print", and he was like: "NO, I'm not doing it!"
There's a serious argument to be made against any kind of car phone app on the basis of privacy alone.
I'm getting to the point of getting ready to build my own damn car, just so it doesn't have any spyware in it.
Unless you want information brokers getting a hold of the data on your sex life, _consider picking the dumbest car on the market._
I'm surprised that BMW doesn't charge a subscription fee to "turn on" your car, after all, using their keyless ignition is a "service." BMW saves you the pain and suffering of having to turn a physical key with your hand. Mind blowing.
I mean, someone had to put that there, right? Like, they don't just come like that, do they?
Trust me, all these subscriptions that customers don't sign up for, will be added to the price of the vehicle. We'll end up paying it regardless.
@@jdubdoubleu Hence why, like Louis said, "Don't pay for it." Don't buy a BMW.
@@davidhunternyc1 it doesn't matter. There will always be people that will pay. All auto brands will follow in time
@@jdubdoubleu Then don't buy a car
what pissed me off about the heated seat subscription is the fact that you either pay to use it or you're just paying to haul the extra weight around. they are significantly heavier
Are they? Theoretically they shouldn't be, it's just a well insulated coil of wire ultimately. I imagine *cooled* seats are a bit heavier, and power adjust seats are definitely a lot heavier, but the heating elements on their own shouldn't be.
@@bosstowndynamics5488weight is weight, what did he say wrong?
@@duckiedx You aren't "paying to haul the extra weight around" when the amount of weight is so small that it's a rounding error. Heated seats aren't, just by way of being heated, "significantly heavier".
@@bosstowndynamics5488 dude imma say it again since you didn’t understand the first time. Weight is weight, it may be subjective but it’s still wasted weight carried if not used. You can’t take that away. You’re only justifying because you probably one of those sucker that’s paying for that so-called “service” BMW is offering.
I’m done replying to people defending ridiculousness.
@@duckiedx Weight is weight, but when your pants weigh more than the extra weight in the seats it seems really silly to get hung up on it.
And I'm not defending BMW, I think they should just have the heated seats enabled for everyone. A subscription model for a piece of hardware that's already in a thing you supposedly own is evil, but so is paying thousands of dollars up front for a bit of nichrome wire in a sleeve in a luxury car. None of that takes away from the fact that the additional fuel cost is so small that if you take 2 otherwise identical vehicles, one of them fitted with heated seats and the other not, you literally wouldn't be able to measure the difference in fuel consumption - random minute variations in manufacturing and trivial changes in conditions will cause differences in fuel consumption multiple orders of magnitude higher than the weight of the heating elements. Complaining about the weight as if it's the main issue distracts from the real problems here.
And no, I'm not a BMW owner, and I don't pay for any add on subscriptions for my nearly 10 year old car. But I also wouldn't get upset at the idea of seat heaters in my car on the basis of the maybe 1kg at most extra weight on a vehicle that weighs well over a thousand times that despite never planning to use them. I would fully expect that they were available to use with no additional cost, but I wouldn't act like the solution is to remove them when just making them a no cost inclusion on the base model would fix all of the actual real issues at play here.
It all began fourty years ago, when a friend of mine bought a VW Golf base model. He was a car electrician and looked at the electrical wiring diagram and figured out that in order to have intermittent wipers, he just needed to add a relay to the breaker box. So he did. And he had intermittent wipers that was only available at the higher end models.
They absolutely understand why people are upset. They are trying to change the language to get you used to it and make it easier later on down the line to get people to accept it. Don't think for a second that their choice of words here isn't 100% deliberate. They're playing the long game here.
The Best thing BMW could have done to smooth over public relations wasn’t to just axe plans for seat heating subscriptions….the best thing they could have done for public perception was to fire the morons that came up with the idea to charge a monthly subscription for heated seats.
But then they'd probably have to fire themselves. :D
Those morons are the top brass themselves, if you think these companies are modular and insular you are wrong, they are monolithic authoritarian nightmares full of nepotism and incompetence at every turn where liars lie to each other daily while shitting on honest workers and consumers.
This will continue to happen until the share holders pull out or the company burns down, this applies to most other large companies.
There's a good chance that would include at least one vice president along with the other greedy morons that are somehow oblivious to the huge problem of subscription fatigue... that they contributed to.
The board demands everyone find more places to extract revenue from their customers.
Dunno, but I disagree that firing the responsible people would have been a good idea. I like that there are some companies who take the L themselves instead of passing it on to their employees.
I saw people defending this like you said, that it would 'streamline car manufacturing -bla bla bla bla'.
Sad fact: Companies, do not pass the savings onto the customer or their workers! It goes to the damned executives.
These dimwits are defending paying for a product but having to rent the functionality. It's so braindead, I do not get how people keep defending moves like this, when all it is- is less value for the consumer and more control and profits for the corporation.
This is just facts, it's not debatable because it's the ever constant of corporations.
The odometer goes up to 140mph, by Sir Clinton, I am going to use the whole 140mph! Milk runs just became shorter.
They’re the owners who never lived somewhere that gets below 40F. And they somehow equate this to them saving money.
No it does not get passed to the execs. It gets passed to shareholders. Which btw is one of the main ways that pension funds make money.
I see rampant corporate brainwashing everywhere. Even from seemingly intelligent and educated people, they can still lack the critical thinking skills to sustain their own opinion so they just adopt the arguments of the corporations that have been drilled through their heads by incessant advertisement and marketing ploys.
Flash news and reality check : consumer's rights and goals are directly and systematically opposed to those of the corporations. Never betray your side by joining theirs, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose !
@@CidVeldoril
Who do you think gets the most stock options?
The hardware to heat the seats has a cost, the software (for that feature) doesn't. The fact that it comes installed by default means you're already paying for the hardware.
I look forward to when people can reprogram their own property without getting hassled by the folks who built or sold that property to them. I love the fact that there are mechanics who can figure out how to put in analog options to activate hardware.
Many years ago I asked why I couldn't volunteer my car to be scanned into Gran Turismo, costs aside. I was told that the problem ultimately lies with the manufacturer of your car and them 'letting you' have your car scanned. So if I had an older BMW modified car, I would have to ask permission from BMW to allow my car to be used in a video game. I thought I owned my car as it is paid off, but apparently I don't own ALL of my car.
Not sure if it works the same way today but apparently you don't actually own some of the things you think you own. On a side note, you can buy property (land) and not be able to do what you want on it due to HOA's and other forces. You really don't own things you buy...
@@JarofMayonaise I don't join or participate with HOA's just to avoid that. As to owning your car, you don't own the DESIGN, which is what you would be providing when you get a car scanned into a game and thus giving something they own out to all. Now, if you had heavily customized your car to the point where it was more your design than theirs, then you would have more to say.
oh, mate, it gets better. BMW released iDrive8 with the new 2/3/5 series, and WITHIN WEEKS!!!!! WEEKS!!!! BMW put out a statement, pissing and moaning that "they are extremely upset that the aftermarket community have "hacked" their software to "bypass" the payment wall to heated seats"..... WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DID THEY EXPECT ?!?!?! they've paid 40-60k for a NEW car, and are now being charged MONTHY for something they've paid to have fitted ?!?!?!?!
"intelectual property".... same thing as Ferarri going after a RUclipsr for wrapping his car in the NyanCat meme@@JarofMayonaise
The products exist. Lots of us go in and code in features that our car already has. This has been a thing for over a decade easy.
Only thing different is it sounds like they're trying to make money on it now. Like some third parties already do.
The problem I have is if they make you pay a hardware subscription and the seat heater breaks are they going to replace it for free?
Since you technically don't "own it".
You know the answer already
Good point. The subscription to my ISP includes a wireless router. It broke once. They sent some guys over, they looked at it for 2 minutes, exchanged the power supply and left. No charges. Because it's theirs. I pay like 1€ per month for using it.
Great question
Technological, modern manufacturers have to decide if they want to own they cars they sell or not. Can't sell me a new seat warmer if I don't own the car, but conversely you can't make me subscribe if I own it outright.
No. You pay subscription for the heat, not the seat or the seat heater 😂😂😂😂
Don't give up on the shirt! There are several sites online that will make duplicates of any piece of clothing you send them, and even make changes to the base design if you want to customize it. It would probably be a fair bit more expensive than buying the original, but it may be worth it if the shirt fits/looks perfect and there are no other options.
There may also be someone who knows how to clean it.
there products that if remove pen ink, more meant patch, but should up scalable bucket with enough product, and just leave a lot longer day or week, and see what happens?
@@dh2032 Uh, WHAT?!?
Rubbing alcohol will remove pen ink, but if it's a cotton shirt...just dye it the color of the ink. Problem solved.
He will never be able to get the pink out of that shirt! Just kidding.... not shaming Rossmann for his pink shirt...... I can't since I have been walking around with my phone in a rose case. The damn Samsung folding case wore out, they are absolutely not available anywhere I have tried to get one... ordered a knockoff case.. ordered RED, they sent Rose. I get comments. Most are funny. One person picked up the phone that was next to me at a breakfast place, and called out "did someone leave their phone here?"
So let me get this straight. They were including the seat warmers in all of their cars to streamline their manufacturing process... but instead of just making it standard and not charging a subscription fee for it, they chose to revert back to a less streamlined manufacturing process? Amazing. Truly, a win for the consumer.
Uhm no the seatwarmer is still in your car, you just can’t use it anymore
Well... They still went with the streamlined manufacturing and put the hardware in every car. You just don't get offered the option to activate it later. That's why BMW didn't get the whole debate. For them it was a simple decision to streamline the manufacturing (that's their core business after all). From their perspective they simply said: "We'll put seat heating in every car now - but we understand that some people don't want to pay for that feature. So, you can opt out of paying for it by not having it active. But since we have the hardware in the car anyway we now also offer the chance to reconsider that choice and use the heaters later on a sub based fee." ... :D
They always had heated seats in the cars, but they used to install the buttons only on the cars that had that option ticked. If you wanted heated seats later, you had to physically change the buttons panel and rewire the connections. Now you tick a box.
I'm not against the practice in principle, but you should be able to buy that option. I'm against the subscription thing.
As long as they get fucked and lose profit for doing so, I don’t care. Never buying a beamer anyways regardless so…
#sayNotoBMWheatedseats shittt
If a feature is so ubiquitous and popular that its actually cheaper just to build said feature into every SKU, that's just a base feature. You've already balanced the books to make the cost worth it, and at that point the subscription fee is only there for the implication that it used to be an additional expense and therefore luxury. This is especially true for BMW because it is a luxury brand, the car itself is priced accordingly for luxury models. And this is a major factor with production and labor all around the world, manufacturing has gotten incredibly efficient to the point where the cost of adding luxury features in a car is not a huge margin compared to the overall cost of making the car, that its MORE expensive overall to have two separate lines of skus than just adding all the hardware you offer into the car, and yet, none of the savings ever make it to the consumer, and the record profits from NOT lowering the price never make it to the workers.
Absolutely this. I understand it's cheaper to have one variant to keep production costs down, but the answer isn't to make them all have it and charge extra to unlock, it's just to have it in the base model. It makes your base model more competitive against rivals, and if your conversion to higher trims suffers it's because your higher trims need to add something ,not because you didn't lock away enough on your lower ones.
All they are is a Broke My Wallet car.
No, they R inflating the price of ALL the cars with extra $hit hoping 2 pressure people into buying $hit they already 'own'. Pretending it does not increase the cost of ALL the seats is retarded, which is insulting 2 the customers, because they R being told they R fuking retards who should 'understand' that they R not paying 4 what they R really paying 4, etc.
I don’t understand how heated seats are even considered an extra luxury feature at this point. Heated seats have been around for so long now, my car from 2007 has them.
@@TheCh0wderp I don't want nor would I want to pay for seat heaters living in the south. If I moved up north I may want them. Have the option to pay for them if I move would be nice.
The part that bothers me most about the article is that, reading between the lines, it's almost certain the seat heaters are still there, just disabled. You're just not allowed to activate them after purchase anymore.
All the parts that actually cost persistent, per-vehicle amounts of money are already there, already paid for, and already wasting physical resources (mass, materials, etc). But they can't be turned on, and then they have the gall to ask not just for a one-time fee, but *indefinite* amounts of money for as long as you want to use it... or until the next generation of cellular modem is released and the 4G modems in the vehicles are discontinued, at which point you can't have it even if you wanted to pay.
Even the true connected features like self-driving are dubious. The expensive hardware is *included* in the cost of the vehicle you already paid, but the software cost tends toward zero (per vehicle) the more of those vehicles are sold. And yet, they get a recurring, LARGE, subscription from every single customer that doesn't tend toward zero even with increasing fleet size. It almost certainly is just a money grab (if I were to be charitable I'd "merely" call it a veil for inefficiencies, and I don't mean headcount numbers), especially when the vehicles themselves aren't getting cheaper either.
Anything that doesn't require cloud or remote machine learning or ongoing functional software updates (I do not include reskins or bugfixes in that) should not have an ongoing subscription cost at all. There's no point to updates, the existing system already worked, and it's already in the car. Even then, most modern "upgrades" or updates are really just to enable features that they didn't hire enough engineers to build before they started selling the thing.
The even more worrying trend is to ask for subscriptions to get access to diagnostic data or prognostics. I'm sorry, the OEM is expecting me pay to access or decode data on the vehicle I own, which they've already collected and used to develop those models, so I know when their bad design decision will cause my vehicle to fail?! The data is there already, and again being used to save the company money by telling _them_ when something was designed insufficiently robustly, so why can't I have it too? You can't even get this stuff off the OBD-II ports anymore because the computers are intentionally not exposing it there.
TLDR
The expensive hardware cost might be partly included in the cost but not fully, it is most probably like printer industry where they sell the printer for a loss but try recupriate the money at much more aggressive rate from the inks which is shitty.
all we need to do is report BMW to the EU commision with facts that BRAND NEW APPLIANCES ARE THROWN TO THE WASTE WITHOUT EVEN USING THEM - all the installed but not enabled "gadgets" in cars are in direct contrary to the EU waste management laws
The software is a one time expense to the manufacturer during R&D, and the customer already paid for the hardware when they purchased the car. Any money the customer sends in the form of a subscription is "free money" to the seller. In short, most subscriptions are for suckers, and there's plenty of them around.
"Not allowed to activate" my foot. It isnt hard to bypass their Seat DRM BS.
They're playing dumb. It's willful ignorance.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
BMW understands the difference between recurring subscription revenue and fixed one-time feature pricing very well, and that's why this is so hard for them to understand...
My favorite BMW story is the timing chain thing. Around the 2000s-ish they figured the timing chains were much too long-lasting. Practically forever, or at least the life span of the vehicle. So they quartered it in diameter. Now you have to change it every 100.000 km. I know a guy who had to buy a new engine for his 2 year old BMW, because they wouldn't do it.
thats pretty disgusting screw bmw
Every company does it. Otherwise the spare parts factories will be shut down
Except Toyota and Honda
So that means Toyota's and Honda's spare parts factories had to shut down 🤣
@@FreedomTalkMedia They use belts, tensioners and pulleys and ALL have to be done at regular intervals.
The other difference between something like heated seats and self parking software is that the parking software is going to be constantly under development and improved and you may be able to get updates to make that feature better. There is no further development needed to turn on a seat heater. There is never going to be an update that will make the seat heater better. So a subscription for the parking software can make more sense to keep the development going for improvements.
Yeah but what if the heated seats require cloud computing to perfectly machine learn the shape of my ass?
I can't afford the reckless driving / parking violation tickets that come with owning a BMW anyways though so I guess it's not my problem lmao
@@bigboi1004Then that should be an optional feature I can choose not to have installed in my car when I buy it. Leave it out of my car and give me the one with only the basic ass shape.
What you are on about. You actually think car companies develop their parking sensors after car rolls of the lot... Dont wont do it. Too much work for no profit. Its sad, but absolutely nothing is free rn
@@sgls15so then why do Apple and Windows constantly release new operating system updates to people who already bought their products?
@@ash.mystic those are not cars.
I understand the switch analogy, it's like when the clerk was confused that i didn't want cartridges with my Epson printer, and was even more confused when I told them "don't worry, I'll never be buying cartridges...", Hacked firmware and refillable cartridges from AliExpress ftw! 😁
Honestly you don't even have to go that far. "Don't worry when I run out of ink I'll just buy a new printer."
I'm ready for the subscription blinker service. I'm old enough to remember bike hand signs.
You cannot use hand signals without paying the subscription fee or you will be sued for an intellectual property violation.
BMW could paywall turn signals, and it wouldn’t matter, because BMW drivers don’t use them anyway.
window down button will be a service,,, gotcha
@@Johnny.Fedora
Airbag and brakes subscription. Safety and security, oh wait...
Well to many drivers regards blinkers as optional anyway
It takes a lot more work to make the seat heater functionality into a "service" than it does to just have it always enabled. Any extra effort that the company has to put out to try justifying the need to charge for the "service" is of the company's own creation. The company makes it harder for both you and themselves, but you have to pay for it. This is the future they want.
They condition you into paying up for even the smallest convenience. Once they conditioned you to think you have to pay X amount for heated seats, they will start charging 3X for backup camera, etc.
I find the biggest issue with this is, far in the future, what if the servers for it don’t work? Or breaks. Hacked. Maybe they become bankrupt.
Basically, any of these and more would mean even if you buy this car in the future used, you won’t be able to access the heated seat feature. It’s literally dead weight
Are, what if they remained on during the summer and you couldn't turn it off. I guess if you are stupid enough to pay for a "service" you deserve to get your ass burned again.
Hard to imagine that BMW will one day go bankrupt, but you have a good point
Valid point.
This exact scenario has already happened with Genesis. Verizon shut down the towers for remote start, traffic, emergency, mapping, etc. Those of us with Genesis cars no longer can remote start.
Already happened at Genesis. All subscription features now dead because Verizon shut down the towers serving systems like remote start. @@Shiinamusiclyricssubs
Companies literally cannot admit wrongdoing of any kind. If at any point a CEO expresses negativity, the stock dips. So it’s all sunshine and rainbows, forever. The condescending HR newspeak is all you’ll ever get out of multinational companies.
BMW execs seem to have been thinking about the heated seat subscription in terms of being able to charge a lot because it would be expensive to have heated seats installed in the car after the fact, though they seem to have forgotten that people can buy after market seat heaters that can be put on top of the seats.
I agree that if they're installing heated seats in every car, it should be standard functionality, but what baffles me is that they probably could've gotten away with a one-time "activation" fee but they were too greedy
There IS a one time activation fee option...
And then there comes the 3rd party garage just switching it on and by passing the manufacturer 😂
BMW is probably lobbying to make that illegal.
Just wait for them to be labeled ter***ists and hackers and put in jail. All car companies are lobbying for that to become the norm instead of people owning their car. @@FrVitoBe
@@FrVitoBe if BMW fails to protect it properly, well ...
I think you're wrong about one thing Louis. They actually do understand why it made the customer mad, they just don't care. This "responding to customer feedback" is basically saying "every time we add a new way to nickel and dime our customers, we either get away with it and make more money, or the customers complain and we take it back and try again later"
If they can put it in every car without charging for it and still make a profit, then maybe it should be a standard feature.
But then how can they charge for it ? Also then wouldn't all cars be top spec models how would they ever charge more than the base price.
I'm really trying to understand it. I think it's something along the lines of, instead of the additional overhead of doing two separate (or partly separate) factory setups, it's cheaper to just do the more expensive one and let people who want the feature cover the cost. In other words, the ones that want it are paying for it to be put in for people who don't want it, except with savings on what that would cost from the overall cheaper setup. But even if that could work, the savings seem to be going only to them, and/or they're charging a subscription instead of a one time fee to enable it. (Or in other words, opt into being one of the ones paying for the feature for everyone, rather than one of the rest having it paid for like that.)
But it seems like an excuse rather than a real reason when it's a recurring payment to enable something once, and it sounds like the savings aren't passed along. (Which would mean the people paying for the feature for everyone would be paying more to cover the people not having it, while whatever savings from the setup are just free money for them while people pay more. Like double dipping or something.)
"how would they ever charge more than the base price" by offering a features that add more than base value, that competitors do not. a seat heater is not. one of them. its very sad that this question is even asked :(
@@chrishart8548
The people who complained that "they are paying twice" are right. The hardware for the seat heater, which goes into every car, is part of the cost of goods to build that car. There is zero possibility that its cost was not included when BMW calculated the base price of the car. As for the software to switch it on, that is already written and loaded on the car (and the cost to do so was included when calculating the base price of the car). The only thing you get from the subscription is that a "zero" is flipped to a "one".
I would be ok with BMW doing that if they had no legal means or recourse to stop people from just modding it to bypass and they couldn’t do anything about it like void warranty or refuse service or stop third parties from offering services and also they cannot withhold the software used in your car and were forced to sell the tools to flash it at no profit. Of course with those in place consumers would have enough rights it would never make sense for BMW to try it in the first place. As it is BMW tries to stop you from doing anything without paying them including locking battery access behind a paywall so you can’t even change that.
I don't think most consumers are mad because they're making their production cheaper while not making the product cheaper. Most consumers are already fully aware that that's a given with just about any product they buy, and honestly don't care if they can afford it.
I'm fairly certain that the core issue at hand is that they're trying to charge people extra money for things that they already quite literally own and paid for, and how scary the prospect is of having real, tangible products we own and used to expect came part and parcel with our purchases are being turned into a monthly subscription. That's really the crux of the whole thing; the heated seats subscription was flat-out a con, and a scary preview of the cyberpunk dystopia that was to come if things kept barreling in this direction (Cue people saying "we're already there," but I'm more trying to make a point about how the average person is probably looking at this).
Just can't have enough of your videos... Please never stop doing this 😁 your points of view resonate with the masses
Hi Louis, love your content!
I think the reason why this sales and marketing hack is using the word “service “ in relation to paying for a switch to be activated, is because he is trying to instill the message on the customer that from now on bmw’s business model will be saas like.
We’re being programmed by him to accept that anything will be subscription based if you buy from them in the future.
I love how many booking point you hit here that are extremely relevant and extremely true. When you sell me a car with a seat heater in it, it's my seat heater and whether you want to turn it on or not, I'm going to get in there and make that thing work.
The argument here is that you don't own everything you pay money for and are allowed to take back to your house. These companies and corporations want to have an unlimited and never-ending stake in the device's hardware and items that are in your home. They always want a legal back door so they can count on that back door to generate profit at a later time.
If you allow the law to reflect that a person does not have an absolute physical right to their property, then essentially you are abolishing private property itself. Private property is an absolute. It's not just about turning a profit, that much should be obvious with how monolithic these corporations are and how united their interest is with the state.
We are fighting something much much greater, not just seat heaters and evil business practices.
"You will own nothing and be happy." -- Satan Claws.
@@RicardoSantos-oz3ujsitting on our asses and quoting some random fuck aint gonna help the situation :)
@@RicardoSantos-oz3uj Exactly. Expect to see more of it.
I remember reading about a car company in the 90s that would put mirrors on all of their sun visors, but you had to pay extra for them to actually cut the hole in the fabric so you could _use_ the mirror.
But hey, at least that was just a one-time charge.
Least you could cut it yourself too lol
Reminds me of my Toyota alarm system that needed to be “installed” by the dealer for a lot of money - when in reality it was turned on via software in 10 seconds.
Many hackers would hack the fabric away - essential installing their own firmware.
I mean how much harder would it be to install a switch for the heated seats especially when you can get it cheaper
For me it was pretty easy ... roundabout 2011 me did finally realize that BMW completely lost their minds and even went literally "hostile" toward their customers. Since that i never visited a dealership, switched the whole family cars to a different brand where you can still do the most of the maintance DIY with a little effort and self education. Before that, i drove every BMW 5 series from E12 to E 39 and then finally a E90 which selfdestructed his lousy, bicycle sized timing chain which runs in a cage made of plastic, at 98.000 kilometers. Greetings from northern Bavaria !
Hey Louis, amidst the right-to-repair drama and anti-consumer practices permeating every industry, I'd like to hear your take on the 3.5 audio jack being phased out of mobile phones.
Since the massive outrage when Apple first did it in 2016, virtually every manufacturer has followed in their footsteps. Now, the average price of mobile audio is higher, it encourages buying more products such as dongles, everything is more easily losable now, and once your battery fails, you have no decent way to fix them. It's just E-Waste.
Whereas the option for a wired alternative was cheaper, and simpler.
This is something that has pissed me off about my last two work phones, and one reason I dread moving to a new personal phone. All of my devices are wired. I have no wireless audio stuff. If I get a new phone, literally everything I own is useless.
This meant it took me quite a while to switch phones, and I considered buying an old model just to get a headphone jack. The dongles are awful. And running over Bluetooth absolutely means you lose audio quality. I would switch directly for a decent android that brought the 3.5 mm back... to h*ll with all these foldable things
Only way is to go "off brand" Xiaomi redimi phones have 3.5mm headphone jacks, NFC and even an IR blaster! I love it as a tool for messing around with and most people shove a cover over their phones so it's not even like its a fashion product at that point
Louis addressed this topic in a handful of videos for example the fairphone 4 videos
Not to mention Bluetooth is insecure as all heck by virtue of being wireless. At least with a wired network, you need literal physical access
Some things might make sense as a subscription. Navigation aids that rely on up to date info such as traffic patterns and current maps with road closures, etc. Things don't rely on constant updates and data, such as litterly turning on a switch, or using software that is a one time install, those should never be subscription.
This. I don’t care whether the “service” is hardware or software. If it doesn’t require ongoing maintenance and updates by the manufacturer, I am not paying for it as a subscription.
Maybe if Google maps wasn't free you might have a point
@@amicaaranearum Not that it's a paid app, Sometimes I'm confused calculator, clock app have updates whenever I check updates for all apps. What is even there to update.
@@KayLa-sq7cv They're not free. They're paid for by advertisers via google. And any company wanting to use them for say, in car navigation aids, have expenses involved therein. They have to pay just to send the data to your car let alone the infrastructure and servers in tayloring that data to their cars and customers. Not to mention if google charges for non-private usage of the data.
Disagree. Even those things that "rely" on updates, can still be had as a one time transaction, non-service. You just have to accept using the same data/software without updates.
I never thought I'd see a video where Louis flashes up random C code. What is the world coming to 😄
If you want to feel better about yourself as a programmer, you can watch my snail's pace progress learning c & python here github.com/realrossmanngroup/
The histogram thing was a fun saga
it started as a total joke, i couldn't make the blank remover work ruclips.net/video/Vyv2wUIRlQI/видео.html
I went onto exercise 1-13 and that was... a sad waste of time ruclips.net/video/NQMTbrw72Jc/видео.html
i tried again and sucked slightly less ruclips.net/video/_6VB06zuDE8/видео.html
then i got it to do vertical after coming to an epiphany at the gym while doing skullcrushers on the bench on how it would work :,, and it almost fucking worked :D ruclips.net/video/kiq1HRUtq8k/видео.html ruclips.net/video/PCafikVDjCw/видео.html
than my boss broke it because it's memory insecure :( so I fixed that ruclips.net/video/Rc6LCiCIf3k/видео.html
Special thank you to adam_edp for all the encouragement & mentorship along the way.
Random code appears to just skip lol
@@rossmanngroupThanks, Louis, I'll check it out. I wrote my first C code back in 1985, back then it was magical in a way I find hard to explain today as everything was new and there weren't millions of practitioners.
That, plus "Baby's First Micrometer"...
...strange times indeed.
@@rossmanngroupProgramming only gets better with practice. Keep it up!
For me its the fact that not only is seat heating easy its just a big quality of life thing that almost everyone uses where park and drive assist is something a lot of people prefer not to have at all rather than just not use it
The thing is they dont even need to pass on savings to people, they just needed to save the money on manufacturing and say "this is an additional value/benefit to the customer (everyone who buys the car gets this extra functionality)". It was such an easy win but they turned it in to a loss.
People should just buy a merc or audi instead if this thing bmw are doing is so bad.
@@chrishart8548 Mercedes charges you a subscription to get full engine power on their cars. Subscription services that are not recurring goods deliveries need to die.
They understand. They just wanna get away with it. Like picking a fight with someone passive aggressively and then saying “my bad”. They know exactly what they did.
And now they are even attempting to gaslight the customers into putting up with this nonsense so the manufacturers can make even more money. What's going too be next? A subscription fee for you to be able to use the car's radio?
Take the shirt to a skilled Korean drycleaner/seamstress shop and ask them to make a replica. It won't be cheap but it will absolutely be worth it and you will get an even better version.
I'm just blown away that seat warmers aren't standard on all BMWs, given how it's a (supposedly) premium label.
My old Honda Accord had seat warmers, so did my old Mazda 3 - and this is in Australia, where it's not quite considered an essential feature.
Being able to turn on a piece of hardware that is in the car since it rolled off the assembly line is apparently a service now.
My 2005 ford has a feature where if you press the unlock button on your keypad, it'll unlock only the driver's side door, and it'll unlock all of them on the 2nd press...
It supposedly was a $300 addon on my trim, that my grandfather did not purchase.
I enabled it with a cheap obd2 connector and the forscan free trial.
We're approaching the point where wheels are considered extra.
Apple car
@@VideosVlogsThatsIt That one won't come with windows.
Your remark is already 15 years too late- lots of car companies charge for the spare wheel
Not talking about the spare wheel, bud...@@stefanboeykens8874
I just bought a spare wheel for my car because it didn't come as standard. The wheel well is there and the wheel now fits perfectly. I gather that they now do this to save a small amount of weight in the standard spec so the official CO2 stats look better. I'll be throwing away the previous bottle of gunk and huge polystyrene insert but the cost of that crap isn't computed. It's Goodhart's Law...
In the wise words of modern day authoritarians “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”.
This is starting to take on a much different meaning than what many have first thought. Think about this as if it applies to almost everything..!!
You vill eat ze buhgs!!
I will not be happy
Collective ownership in the hands of the highest bidder
Inb4 BMW stops selling cars entirely and switches to a 100% lease model.
I do agree with you but I also agree with the person that questioned software subscription as aposed to heated seats.
If the car is advertised with those features, be it heated seats or inbuilt navigation, it should be part of the package, not subscription, they are all available in the car to use right away BUT to donso requires a OTA update to unlock, this requires a subscription.
No, the car has thosebfeatures already in the car, the car is NO cheaper and probably more expensive than the prior year or model, if it's in the car, it's there, the cost of programing, installing has already been infused with the cost of the car, why should you have to pay anything more. I have a Holden VE2 SV6 and this sorta happened with me, the car is advertised as navigation available but to have that I would have to pay $400 for get this a sd card that slots into the head unit, the navigation button is there on the steering wheel, when pressed it looks for the sd card, doesn't find it, return no navigation available, the backof the head unit has the slot for the sd card but there is no sdcard. So although the car is designed to have the sd card, I can buy the sd card for $400, there is a working specific button there to launch the software, I can't cause it's not there, yet if I am happy to pay the ludicrous $400 for a piece of software worth at most $10-20 U can use something that was advertised to seemingly come with the car in the first place.
This was the beginning of the ( subscription) based model used in today's cars and motorcycles.
The stuff is already there for everyone, bit now you need to subscribe to a service to get a OTA update to unlock the feature, it stupid and people should say nope, no subscriptions, and I want a $5000 refund on the buy price cause these features are available to everyone
Love your work man. Not many people will understand what you do but they will talk about it when it’s too late
In my Lincoln all I have to do for an "air-conditioned" seat or a "heated" seat is just push 1 of 2 buttons. Came built into the vehicle. Works every time I need it. 😊
As someone who gave up an IT degree because I struggled with programming, I feel you Louis. If it's in the car it should be on the sticker. Let people get a discount by NOT enabling features they don't care about, rather than forcing them to pay more for something they already own.
If it's in the car it should be enabled by default. If it's intended to be an option DO NOT INSTALL IT IN THE CAR BY DEFAULT. My 2000 mustang, sure it has the connector for traction control but do you know what it's missing? The actual mechanism that's attached to the brake lines to do the traction control.
That’s the same thing.
If you want to look at it that way, then not buying the heated seating subscription is a “discount” on the price of the car.
However you look at it though, you shouldn’t have to continuously pay for a simple feature that is already installed in your car. They made their money off of it already when they sold you the car. Paying a subscription on top of that is just them seeing how much money they can get out of you.
That is what they do, you pay less for not having it enabled
@@thatguythere6161 The ONLY thing I can think of where a subscription for this can work is the way a motorcycle airbag vest company does it. You can either buy it upfront OR you can pay a subscription till it is payed off. We can argue ethics about the airbag company later but that is atleast something they provide. You can pay the $800 or x amount a month and can reactivate the subscription later (so you can cancel it during the winter and reactivate in the spring), and once you reach the $800 you can freely use it and you fully paid it off.
@@Souls4Roca Then why the hell are they installing it in the first place? If I'm buying a car and the heated seats are already installed by default then I shouldn't have to pay to have it activated....
I recently bought a Ford E250 for work. Just basic features no electric windows, no power locks, no key fob, regular AM-FM radio. And an air conditioner and heater. It's a thing of wonder. I had forgotten how beautiful simplicity is.
He 100% understands why he is using the word "service", and it's why he is in the position he is in and straight faced earning his check by his CEO slavers.
As for the shirt stains... Try this. Sounds weird, but I used to get ink stains out of my silk ties with hairspray. And if the hairspray trick doesn't work, you could always see if a dry cleaner could get the stains out. Or maybe you could try having the shirt dyed a darker color to match the ink? Just a few suggestions.
To remove ink stains from a shirt, you can:
Apply hairspray to the stain. Hairspray should be alcohol-based and should be spot tested on an inconspicuous area first.
Let the hairspray set for a few minutes.
Blot the stain with a clean cloth.
Soak the shirt in a solution of dish-washing detergent, white vinegar, and warm water for 30 minutes.
Rinse and wash the shirt as usual.
Dye it black
I don't think it was the fee to activate it is what made this seem so slimy to most people, it was the fact that it was a subscription model type of service. I think many people's opinion would have been less negative if they only allowed them to "activate" it for a one-time fee any time after purchase and not in any situation, have it available as a subscription fee. Not sure if they offered it as a one-time or not before, but still, even OFFERING a montly fee for it means/shows that they are willing to sucker some clients.
Yeah, no. Its because when someone purchases a vehicle, they don't want any subscription service on it. This is why On-Star was such a dismal failure. When I buy something...everything better work. I'm not paying a fee so that seat heaters, windows, blinkers, etc...work. I just won't buy it, and find a vehicle with the features I want and none of the monthly extortion.
A "Service" is something which requires ongoing work to maintain it (eg. updating maps for navigation, improving parking software). The "heater" requires one-off action to activate (which the customer rightly thinks should be included with the heating hardware he has already paid for).
Something not mentioned, is that as more people get the "service" it just a matter of time until that "service" is increased or there is a "convenience" fee or surcharge. With these types of automatic monthly renewal subscription "services" the greed by the company is mouth watering and they are chomping at the bit to charge just that much more to pad the bottom line.
The next problem is that these companies will then charge you for "updates" and at first it may maybe infrequent, but once enough pay for it, they again, will turn around and nickel and dime you, the consumer, little by little.
Then they will "package" it with other useless options, to up charge you, like you get with cable. You want Channel X, but to get it, you gotta pay for Y and Z as well, or you can pay for X by itself but it's more money.
Personally, I look forward to those that can HACK into the system, get it for free, and then tell everyone else how to defeat it. Reminds me of the good ol satellite days of yesteryear.
BMW gets a HUGE FAIL for this, BUT deserves everything they get when it goes south on them.
The company Wondershare changed their language from “updates” to “upgrades” and then charged their customers to get the software updates.
The world is moving towards a “pay to do anything” model; and they think changing the language will alter what the end result is.
Yes it is the reason that I did not buy Wondershare's PDF software...and it needed to be constantly connected to the internet to function properly.
I do all my own maintenance and I was done with BMW when they tossed the physical oil stick. Hearing this is just insanity. My 2004 325CI will be the last when it goes.
I bought my daughter a 2023 civic couple of months ago and it has heated seats. It just came with the EX trim package which also included more options along with the heated seat for only about 3,000$ more. You would think just old tech which doesn't cost much to add would be standard on a luxury brand like BMW.
The most funny thing about this switch thing is that if they were actually to make this, it would be probably extremely overly engineered and complicated piece of crap just to prevent you from bypassing the subscription 😂
Someone will be able to hack it, it's just a matter of time
Here's the copy of my comment on your previous video:
I've been following these big corp overreaches and dirty tricks even before you spoke about it. I would discuss it with my cousin, especially the BMW heater subscription, and he was sceptical about what I was saying. I don't know if he believed me. Fast forward to this year, he got a new BMW X5 ($120 000) from the BMW factory on one year lease, maintenance and everything included, because it's cheaper than buying a new one. There's no way this is a viable business model and they have to be government subsidized in some way but this a different topic.
Anyways, the car has almost everything, including self driving. It has automatic parking, you don't need to press gas or brakes, so the hardware is there. He was exploring the options of the entertainment system when he got the car and he shows me the self driving option. It's locked and you can unlock it for a one time payment of $1850 or so 😂😂😂
Which means he should pay almost 2000 Dollars each year, for every car to have that enabled. He bought it during summer so I can't wait for winter to see if the heated seats, steering wheel and mirrors are included or if that's also behind a paywall.
Depending on just how cheap he got it, the discount might be from him not having to deal with the legally-enforced, local monopolies we call car dealerships
I don't know what agreement your cousin entered into but as far as I'm aware a lot of leasing arrangements are actually done by third parties who buy the car from the manufacturer and then loan it to the customer in a semi car loan fashion. That leasing company can onsell the vehicle at the end of the term and typically charges a lot more per year than the effective depreciation cost, so it's nowhere near as cheap as many buyers think on first glance.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 like you said, you don't know. The car was made on order and picked up at BMW. No middle man.
I have a BMW and there is a button that makes a text show up "This feature can be activated through MyBMW subscription" (roughly translated from French). I don't even know what the button does, but it makes me angry ervery time I accidentally press it.
It's probably to turn on your turn signals, those are optional because they're rarely used on BMWs. You said you sometimes press it on accident.😁
would be a shame if you modified the guts and wired that button to something else
@@zlac we'd never press that by accident, must be something else :x
Optional extras on cars used to be the items that only some people wanted so it made sense to build a different manufacturing line. If everyone wants it (read: wants to pay for it) then it's the perfect feature to add as standard. If >90% of customers wants this cheap feature it then just add it.
They know why it annoys people, they just don't want to admit that they know why it annoys people so that the option to go back on subscription heated seats is available to them. It's a profit motive that they don't want to permanently close the door on.
That and padding their massive egos.
The heated seat thing that they really don't seem to get - they added weight to "my" car, they increased the use of fuel and therefore "my" cost to use the car. They did that to stream-line the build process. And having saved money on the build process (and the storage and shipping, since they now don't have multiple different types of seats to deal with), they want to charge a monthly fee to use the thing. They still want everything in their favour - the cheaper manufacturing, the cheaper storage, yada yada yada, but without giving anything back to the consumer.
@@Dowlphin No, the cost is already calculated into the car. They have to assume the possibility that potentially no one would pay for the 'service'. They are not going to build the vehicles at a loss. They are not stupid.
Make no mistake. BMW is making the cars for as cheap as possible and then they try to use crippleware to extract maximum amount of money from the exact same car from every customer. And that crippleware is possible only because they have the monopoly on the software running on said car.
Things went straight down the crapper once the judge in the case of ford vs shareholders ruled that the sole purpose of a company is to generate profits for its shareholders and is not allowed to do anything that might reduce the money paid to shareholders, such as raising salaries of employees after a profitable year, or lowering the cost of products.
@@DowlphinIn ideal circumstances free markets absolutely do work, it's just that they rely on a lot of hidden assumptions that are almost never true in practice:
1) Broad competition. This requires lots of competitors on equal footing so that a small group of market makers can't simultaneously decrease the quality of their products. Factors that cut against this today are that most industries are dominated by a small number of giant multinationals, aggressive overapplication of IP law prevents competition, the complexity of modern products and legislation increases cost of entry.
2) Actively participating consumers. The majority of consumers have to care enough to select the best product for their use case. You might argue that if they don't care it doesn't matter, but in reality most of the time they do care but lack the energy to carry through with that effort when working multiple jobs and having to make those purchasing decisions many times a day on average
3) Fully informed consumers. The increasing complexity of products and services, plus increasing efforts by businesses to hide as many details as possible about their products and services, means that most consumers lack the skill and knowledge to accurately select the best option for their needs. This leads to propagation of practices that are universally bad for the customer but aren't evident for them to avoid (see - every single car brand now harvests all of your personal information and sells it for a recent example)
The ideals of capitalism working well were developed over a hundred years ago where the most complex thing you might buy was a horseless carriage that was simple enough for any customer to fully understand and early enough that you always had the option to just not buy it at all. These days there's too many non-optional, high complexity expenses in highly consolidated industries for anyone to consider modern markets "free" in any meaningful sense.
Louis.... spot on on this... It is NOT repeat, not an added value feature...its same as charging car owners.... sunshade in your windshield... who would do this???
I have a basic car and I think I’m going to keep it that way going forward. Paying EXTRA to use ANY car feature is crazy to me.
BMW also offers the ability to activate forever with a one time fee (so buy the option essentially).. but.. if the car fails to meet BMW policy at some point they will deactivate it again. I can not see how this will not dramatically tank resale value of these cars and thus increase lease pricing. After leasing new for a long time I’m seriously wanting back to analog cars without all that stupid crap on it.
never stop Louis, love what you do. so much talk but you act. most of us are already beaten but you give us all hope to carry on
See if a dry cleaner could get the stain out. Of course there is specific solutions for ink removal. Though I don't know if garments fall under its acceptable medium for application.
To me, the most frustrating part of this is that the heated seats are optional at all. Isn't this supposed to be a premium vehicle line? Apparently it is not.
3 things..
1) When I talked to someone about this ages ago our talk boiled down to this:
Things have expectations from the past. IE If a car has heated seats installed it's expected they can be used. Since we have "Precedent" aka it being that way in the past of this being the case it becomes a modern Expectation. When an expectation is broken by anyone, anger is the most common reactions and normally justifiably so. It's why people are mad over the seats vs parking assit, even though both have hardware installed and need to be "activated". The expected precedent being broken is what causes the anger.
2) "Service" being used in this way is bullshit. A "service" means you have to do something ongoing. This company doesn't have to do shit to turn on this "feature" of my seats warning because of pre-installed hardware. Now the other things that require a subscription fee are JUSTIFIED to me IF the car company has to do something to make it happen. IE my car needs to talk to a server farm for the processing power needed to do the thing. Or in car internet / wifi. That to me is 100% justified for a service fee but not something that does not require any outside resources to manage. If the process is contained to the car, and it can do it fine. It's a feature, enable it. One time charge. Move on. If the process requires outside help it's a service, I'll pay it if I want it.
3) This part sucks to say but builds on part 1. Even if something has precedent that in the past it worked like X does not mean it always should or will. If this car maker wants to take things that shouldn't be a service and make them a service they are well within their right. HOWEVER, I personally will never shop with this company ever again once this becomes their method. I don't like it, but it's business to run how they want (into the fucking ground IMO).
You’ve expressed this very well. BMW owners are very devoted. They are amazing cars. They are just amazing cars. But I felt exactly like you did. Like I would rip the seat out and put my own wire in. We don’t want people bossing us and controlling our stuff. You were really en pointe with your description of the word service. We have to stand up to this. Everywhere. Obviously not just BMW. On a related note, plenty of people do hack the software.
😂 amazing for $$ hungry mechanics but not the actual owners 🙄
I don't know much about cars but i've always heard bmw is kinda bad compared to other luxury brands. Something tells me it's for reasons like this
@@scubasteve6175 Engines are reliable if maintained, but they do need more maintenance than an econobox of course. The main problem is parts are all expensive and there is an overuse of plastic in components under the hood that WILL go brittle. The drivers are really bad tho.
They're actually terrible cars. Very low build quality and very often behind in terms of technology.
Another difference between the heated seats and self parking is the sensors for self parking are also used for other safety features. Heated seats is literally hardware that's installed in the car that can't be used for anything else. So yes, you're paying for the cost of the hardware to be installed (don't tell me they just throw it in for 0 cost) and then you have to pay again for the use of them.
Louis, you can dye your t-shirt a dark color, like navy blue or black. It will be as good as new.
I honestly like it's new colour
Hi Louis, I am so glad that there is someone out there on the look-out for us. Heaven knows we need people like you. Keep on truckin' and tellin'.
Bucket seat gaming chairs are literally the most uncomfortable thing ever.
Also very bad for your body, because bucket seats are designed to keep you from sliding around in them while driving.
When used as an office or gaming chair, they prevent you from changing your sitting position. Sitting in the same position for too long is one of the main causes of RSI, muscle cramps and back pain in office environments.
My 2005 Lexus has all of this for free. It's mental. I would try to find any way around any subscription service for a feature of a car before I actually paid for it.
I also don't think they always have separate assembly lines. I had a Nissan with manual seats and underneath I could see all the electrics were already installed for the electric seat premium version of the same model. The only thing missing was a switch.
You are dead on in this .... And the BMW Representatives fully and one hundred percent understand the situation they're just not allowed to acknowledge it because the top management refused to accept any other way of thinking. The PR people say exactly one hundred percent what they are paid to say.
Louis, I greatly appreciate you highlighting just how ridiculous the subscription fad is becoming.
1:15 what a huge deflection. "Yo, get pranked bro, we actually were just testing software lel. Oh refund? Uhhhhhhhhhhh. We great appreciate you contributing to our future development of other software systems." It's so refreshing hearing a someone outside the bubble of Car Enthusiasm see this as the total scam it was! I'm glad pushback actually got action.
I made like 2 whole videos dedicated to this stupid Trend of Car Interior Software Subscription Services. Super glad most consumers aren't eating up their BS.
Come on Louis! We are just lucky that BMW did not force people to have a subscription to allow the steering wheel to be unlocked to allow us to enjoy the steering service of the car! LOL!
sure they must have a subscription for the turn lights as NO drivers are PAYING for them and NOT USING THEM
Wish we wouldn't give them these types of ideas, even as a joke.
were wating for a car that wont evne start without internet connection